The district is not eligible for the grants because to receive it, a district must be able to show academic progress from the previous year, she said.

“Our ELA and math scores have not gone up, our graduation rates have not gone up, so we’re not eligible to apply,” Slack said.

Neither, it seems, is the Chittenango school district in Madison County. Superintendent Michael Schiedo said his district has looked at the requirements and decided that it wasn’t.

Auburn Superintendent J.D. Pabis said his district may have made enough academic progress to be eligible.

“We’re relatively close to it, and since we’re that close, I want to take a shot at it,” he said.

There’s another eligibility requirement that Auburn may or may not make. According to the state Education Department, a district that is selected to receive a grant will be eligible to actually receive the money only if it can prove that it has fully implemented a new teacher evaluation system by the end of this school year. The systems have to be negotiated with the teacher unions.

Districts around the state are struggling to come to terms on a new system and get it approved by state ed. Cuomo said during a visit to Syracuse Wednesday that not a single district has a new system implemented yet.

“Ours is not in place,” said Pabis, of the Auburn district. “But we’re working with the (teachers) association and we’re going to apply. Whether or not we’re eligible we’ll find out as the process goes along.”

Rick Timbs, the executive director of the Statewide School Finance Consortium, which consists of nearly 360 school districts, says his organization agrees with Cuomo’s vision for improved student performance but says Cuomo’s performance grants plan put districts in a tough position.

Many districts are not eligible for the grants, some may have little or no resources to write the grant application, and if districts are eligible, the don’t know how much money they would actually get, Timbs said.

At a time when districts already have undergone major budget cuts and likely are facing more, the consortium would like to see the grant money put into state aid, he said.

The New York State School Boards Association, too, wants the $250 million to go into operating aid, especially for high-needs districts, which include Syracuse.

New York State United Teachers has posted a petition on its Web site that calls on the state lawmakers to put the money into aid, not a competitive program “that will only benefit a few select districts.”

Cuomo argues that the competitive funds will encourage innovation and efficiency by rewarding high achievers. State aid is distributed based purely on a formula, whether a district is performing well or miserably, he said during a meeting with The Post-Standard editorial board.

The poorest, lowest-achieving districts are not shut out of competition for the money, he said.

“The poorer districts say, ‘But we’ll never perform as well as the higher districts. I don’t accept that, first of all, and that would be a sad and damning commentary,” Cuomo said.

Secondly, a district’s performance is not evaluated compared to other districts but on its own progress from one year to the next year, Cuomo said.

“But look, if they are saying to you, we made no progress from last year, then that’s another discussion,” he said.

As a district that’s in that boat, the Syracuse district is among the crowd that wants the $250 million spent as aid, not in the performance incentive funds. The district budget proposal, unveiled by Slack and Superintendent Sharon Contreras the day Cuomo as in town, called for the district to advocate for that cause.

It could mean an estimated $5 million or more in aid for the district’s proposed $373.5 million budget, Slack said.
Contact Maureen Nolan 470-2185 or mnolan@syracuse.com